The Hong Sang-soo Retrospective Is a Must-See

The director Hong Sang-soo on the set of his film “The Day He Arrives,” in 2011.

Photography by Cinema Guild / Everett

The comprehensive retrospective of the films of Hong Sang-soo at Museum of the Moving Image, running today through June 19th, is one of the most important recent movie events, because Hong is one of the best filmmakers in the world but very few of his films have been distributed here or are even available on DVD or streaming.

Born in 1960, and making films since 1996, Hong is one of the most distinctive creators of cinematic styles currently active, a fact that’s all the more surprising and remarkable inasmuch as he’s essentially a first-person realist. His movies are, for the most part, centered on characters who are filmmakers or connected to the movie business or other arts. They involve a handful of people, mainly young ones, or ones who age in a manner that’s roughly in step with Hong himself, who meet by chance, reconnect, couple off, split up, drink heavily, embarrass themselves, go away, come back—they live modest but turbulent lives of great emotional intensity but little grand drama. Their artistic dreams fuse with vanity, their romantic desires are inseparable from egotism, yet their complexities aren't psychological but, rather, existential.

Hong burrows deep into the minutiae of behavior—and does so with a repertory of distinctive stylistic devices, including extended takes of characters sitting side by side, brisk zooms, and puckish distances. While looking closely, even fixedly, at his characters, he looks past their calculations into their imaginations and surpasses their petty identities to render their cinematic ones iconic. Hong creates an infra-cinema, in which the furiously meticulous attention to his characters’ daily practicalities and private lives, the sharp-eyed focus on artists’ routines, comes out the other side to reveal grand vistas of a complete inner and outer world.

His films display a quietly exquisite, subtly riotous playfulness, both in the characters’ behavior and in his own tweakings of cinematic form. He uses dream sequences and fantasy scenes, shows films within films, and tells stories that fold in on themselves, culminating in the brazen audacity of “Hill of Freedom” and his most recent film to be shown here, “Right Now, Wrong Then” (which opens on June 24th). They’re very funny movies—self-mocking in their self-pity—and the intimate horrors and failures they portray are the stuff of his artistic glory. For Hong, the wreckage behind every unmade film is a virtual screenplay for every one that gets made, every personal calamity is a potential triumph of art.

Of course, it’s only the narrow bounds of comfort—absence of dictatorship, distance from war—that sustain the comic dramas of frustrated urbanity, and, as a South Korean filmmaker, Hong knows it, and shows it, in subtle echoes, whether in the name of a café or a town, or in the polyglot internationalism that connects his milieu to ones far away. Hong has often been compared to the French director Éric Rohmer in the intimate precision of his romantic roundelays, and Hong has emphasized a French connection: one film, “Tale of Cinema,” nods at Rohmer’s four “Tales” of the nineteen-nineties; another, “Woman Is the Future of Man,” gets its title from a poem by Aragon; “Woman on the Beach” nods to the title of a film by Jean Renoir; “Night and Day” was filmed in Paris; “In Another Country” stars Isabelle Huppert. My former professor and friend, the late Gilberto Perez, likened Hong’s films to those of Jean Eustache—in particular, “The Mother and the Whore,” for its self-examining yet self-deprecating view of an urban intellectual in romantic crisis. I’m equally inclined to liken Hong’s films to those of Alain Resnais, which, even in the absence of explicit reflexivity, place the cinematic transformations and refractions of experience at the core of every story.

As Hong’s budgets have decreased, his output has increased. The only other filmmaker who’s as discerning and as creative about the ubiquity of stories in life at hand is Joe Swanberg (though there’s another, contemporary French filmmaker who comes close—Philippe Garrel). Neither film distributors nor home-video distributors have done justice to Hong’s prolific output; I’d ardently hope that a boxed set (or two or three) of his work would be a priority (calling Criterion!). In the meantime, there’s the Moving Image series, and it’s cause for celebration. I’ve been writing about his films with unrelenting astonishment and admiration; here are some capsule reviews, blog posts, and video essays in which I discuss his work.

In his work, truth is revealed by displaying the artifice that goes into the telling.

As the years passed, Tom grew more entrenched in his homelessness. He was absorbed in lofty fantasies and private missions, aware of the basest necessities and the most transcendent abstractions, and almost nothing in between.